Column
Atheism
Creed
6 min read

Confessions of an atheist philosopher Part 5: leaping for truth

In the fifth of a series, philosopher Stefani Ruper recalls the night she decided to do something, to get data about God.

Stefani Ruper is a philosopher specialising in the ethics of belief and Associate Member of Christ Church College, Oxford. She received her PhD from the Theology & Religion faculty at the University of Oxford in 2020.

A black and white close up of a women in a street at night, turning to look around at a neion 'open' sign.
Trevin Rudy on Unsplash.

My name is Stefani. I was a committed atheist for almost my entire life. I studied religion to try to figure out how to have spiritual fulfillment without God. I tried writing books on spirituality for agnostics and atheists, but I gave up because the answers were terrible. Two years after completing my PhD, I finally realised that that’s because the answer is God.  

Today, I explain how and why I decided to walk into Christian faith.  

Here at Seen and Unseen I am publishing a six-article series highlighting key turning points or realisations I made on my walk into faith. It tells my story, and it tells our story too.  Read part 1 here. 

 

Inhale…two, three, four… Exhale... two, three,  four…. Inhale… two, three, four… exhale… two, three four… 

I was laying in bed, staring at the ceiling, doing breathing exercises trying to calm my body and mind. The clock on my bedside table flashed 3:59. I had a lecture on twentieth century French metaphysics to attend in four hours. But I couldn’t sleep.  

Night time anxiety had been my habit for as long as I could remember. It all started when I was four years old and first asked myself what would it be like to be dead? while trying to fall asleep one night. Since then, my anxiety often started with normal, day-to-day worries (did I complete enough items on my to-do list today?). But they almost always spiraled into bigger concerns. I always found my way to questions like Is this really all there is?  

I sighed and kept on with my breathing exercises. Inhale… two, three, four… exhale… two, three, four… 

But then… 

Then, I had an idea

I blinked and sat up.  

God might be there!, I thought to myself. 

 God might have been there all along!  

I started to laugh, incredulous. 

Here’s the two things I had just learned that made me finally wake up to this extraordinary possibility. 

Interpretation is a choice 

When I was an atheist, I often said that if God existed and wanted us to believe in Him, God would make it obvious. God would write something like 'Believe in Me!' in letters in the sky.  God would give us indubitable evidence of His existence. 

But interpretation is a matter of choice.  

It’s like a story a man once told at my church. He was out walking in the woods at night. He said, God if you’re there, give me a sign! A shooting star went through the sky. He then shrugged and said to himself, oh, it’s a coincidence.  

I had always told the story of my life as a string of coincidences. No matter how uncanny an event, I always assumed it was pure chance. But what if I had been ignoring the underlying narrative and purpose to things all along? God could be communicating with us and steering the course of our lives all the time, but if we never took the initiative to interpret our experiences with Him in them, we would never see Him. 

The only way for me to assess God’s possible role in my life would be to start interpreting events as if God were the author. I wouldn’t have to get rid of my “pure coincidence” view. I would only have to add this new one. Then, I could compare the two.    

Openness to evidence is a choice 

The philosopher William James makes the extraordinary, underappreciated point that there are certain kinds of beliefs you can’t get the evidence for unless you believe them first. One example is jumping over a chasm or gap on a hiking trail. You can’t successfully jump over the chasm and get the evidence that you’re capable of jumping it unless you believe you can do it first.  

God is similar in a very specific sense: evidence of God’s presence in your life is only available to you if you believe first.  

Imagine your heart is a room with a door. God could be shining a floodlight at the door all the time, but if you don’t open the door a crack, God’s light will never be able to shine through. I now believe that God can do a lot of amazing things, but God doesn’t impose. It’s up to all of us to crack open our doors. 

Once you do, you can start to get experiential evidence. This might be feeling loved, experiencing peace and joy that surpass your previous understanding, or unusual confidence or resilience amidst troubles. It might be a sense of forgiveness beyond what you’ve known before. Or it might be experiences of healing and personal growth—often of issues that you’ve tried to heal multiple ways. 

The greatest hypothesis of all was out there waiting to be tested—and I wasn’t participating! 

The leap of faith is a leap for truth 

I used to think that faith was a betrayal of the truth. If I wanted to be loyal to the truth, I needed to stick to the “bare facts” provided by science. I shouldn’t ever claim anything beyond them, on the off chance the claim might be false.  

However... 

When it comes to God (as well as many other things, such as what it means to be a good person), the only way to find out what’s true is to put the belief into play. It’s to embrace a hypothesis, act on it, and see what happens.  

When I jolted up out of bed that night, I realised that throughout my entire life I had thought that I was being loyal to the truth, but what I was actually doing was standing on the sidelines. The greatest hypothesis of all was out there waiting to be tested—and I wasn’t participating! The human species is in its infancy. There’s so much we don’t know about existence. What if the universe is lovingly Created? What if there are dimensions beyond what we can see and touch?  

The truly courageous thing, I now believe, is the opposite of what I’d always thought. It isn’t to refrain from belief. It’s to dare to believe.  

The verdict 

That night, I decided I would try to get data about God. I’d walk into a life of prayer, worship, and faith. I’d work on re-interpreting my story with God in it. I’d identify biases or misconceptions I had about faith and educate myself about them. I’d ask God to help me see, feel, and believe, if He was there. 

I’m less than a year in. But today I’m sleeping better, healing deep emotional wounds, overcoming unhealthy habits, finding peace, stepping deeper into joy, and experiencing feelings of invulnerability where I used to feel the most vulnerable. This sense of invulnerability is beyond anything I’ve ever experienced before, like a spring of confidence and peace welling up from depths beyond me. I consider this data for God. 

Might I be wrong? Absolutely. But at the end of the day I am just one person. All I can do is go out and get some data and share what I find, contributing my little piece to the species-wide quest for the truth of things.  

So go out and get your data. Take a chance on God, if you like. Crack open your door. See if light shines through. Let me and others know what you find.  

Article
Belief
Creed
4 min read

Why news of the ‘Quiet Revival’ needs taking with a pinch of salt

When Christianity becomes cool, it has a tendency to lose its soul.

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

An ancient salt shaker sits next to a pile of crushed rock salt.
Out of the salt shaker.
Jonathan Tame on Unsplash.

Mark Twain, that purveyor of slanted wisdom, was wary of data. "Figures often beguile me," he wrote, "particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'" 

Now whether Disraeli ever said this is a moot point. The quotation has been attributed to figures as various as Walther Bagehot, Arthur Balfour and the Duke of Wellington. Either way it has gone down in history as expressing a certain strand of suspicion when it comes to statistical analysis of the future. 

This phrase came to mind this past week when reading The Quiet Revival, a study conducted by the Bible Society that suggests that the long story of church decline in England and Wales is over. It claims that church attendance has risen by 50 per cent over the last six years and particularly young adult men are increasingly turning to the Church, especially to the Roman Catholic and Pentecostal versions of it. 

The report been hailed and celebrated by Christian commentators, perhaps in a spirit of relief, thankful for some good news against the background of months of dreary and gloomy news of resigning Archbishops, looming splits in the church over sexuality and the ongoing seemingly inevitable process of decline. 

Now I don't for a moment mean to doubt the results of the survey. Or to get all Scrooge-like at the findings. For those of us who have been part of the church for years it is indeed welcome news and a cause for some cautious optimism. It always lifts the spirits a little to feel that others see what you see, and you're not whistling in the dark when it comes to continuing to believe. ‘Revival’ is perhaps too ambitious a word to use right now. It would need a lot more hard evidence from bigger surveys and more observable results to deserve such a designation. But there do seem to be straws blowing in the wind, perhaps the first signs of a refreshing breeze which might yet sweep away some of the shadows of sceptical unbelief. 

The appeal of Christian faith is precisely the fact that it's not based on how many people believe it. 

Yet forgive me if I take all this with a pinch of salt. The popularity of Christianity has always waxed and waned throughout the last two thousand years. There are times when it has been the flavour of the month - or the century - such as when it started to become the official religion of the Roman Empire 300 years or so after the time of Jesus. Yet popularity brings its dangers. When Christianity becomes cool, it has a tendency to lose its soul, its radical nature diluted by the flocks of people drawn to the cross as a kind of fashion accessory. At other times it has dwindled to a few hardy souls braving it out, like the eleven fearful disciples huddling together in Jerusalem, looking for an escape route after the execution of Jesus, or the tough, rugged Christians who carried on praying during years of persecution, often paying for their faith with their lives.  

Christianity’s claims to truth are not dependent on a referendum. For us Christians, our faith remains true whether or not people believe it. The fact that more people may be going to church now than a few years ago doesn't make the Christian faith any more or less true. I've never taken the predictions of the church's demise too seriously. Which is why I'm not one for putting out the bunting when the predictions go the other way.  

This why it seems to me that, like Mark Twain, believers in Jesus ought also to be a little sceptical of statistics. Numerical projections and probability theory have their uses in trying to spot social trends, but they don't have much bearing on questions of truth. After all, statistical analysis of what tends to happen to dead people would never have predicted the Resurrection. 

The appeal of Christian faith is precisely the fact that it's not based on how many people believe it. It centres on an event where the eternal became temporal, where God entered into human history in the shape of a Galilean rabbi. It therefore transcends time and space, opinion polls and surveys. It gives a confidence rooted not in the swinging mood of public opinion, up one minute and down the next, but instead something lasting, permanent and reliable.  

So be glad, if you want, at the prospect of a coming renewed wave of faith. But don’t be fooled into thinking this proves anything. As Jesus once said: “Do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” 

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